Lawyers representing a teenage boy allege in a suit brought last month that Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall forced their unidentified minor client to undergo estrogen injections that not only mutated his body, but also changed his brain chemistry and left him the target of mockery from other inmates.
According to James Queally, of the Los Angeles Times, the then-sixteen-year-old:
…whose identity is being withheld because of his age, was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD, two days after he was arrested and housed at Eastlake Juvenile Hall in June 2019, the lawsuit said.
Ahh, yes. That psychiatric term, “Oppositional Defiant Disorder”, defined by the American Psychiatric Association as meaning “a recurrent pattern of negativistic, defiant, disobedient, and hostile behavior toward authority figures that persists for 6 months”. In other words, he defied commands from so-called “authorities”.
A label anyone familiar with freedom might want to decry.
And so, as is the M.O. of many government hierarchies, the commandants handling this boy decided what would be “in his best interest”. And notice how Queally phrases this:
Medical records reviewed by The Times show that the teen’s testosterone levels were “slightly high” when the doctor who diagnosed him prescribed daily doses of estrogen.
What does “slightly high” mean, and how is the boy’s testosterone level in any way a matter of government interest? And to merely focus on “the doctor who ‘diagnosed’ him” -- whatever that means in this world of psychobabble excuses for state tyranny – and then report that the doc “prescribed him” is to imply that this was a benevolent medical decision that was voluntarily accepted by this minor child.
Queally also glosses over the power imbalance when writing:
After taking approximately 13 daily doses of the hormone, the teen was diagnosed with gynecomastia, defined as the enlargement or swelling of breast tissue in males whose estrogen level is too high, medical records show.
No. The teen didn’t “take” the estrogen injections.
They were FORCED ON HIM.
He was forcibly emasculated and turned into a temporary eunuch as his breasts grew and other inmates mocked him for it – all at taxpayer expense – according to the suit.
But at least Queally offers this bit of information:
The lawsuit described the treatment as “experimental.” The doctor who prescribed the estrogen, Danny Wang, could not be reached for comment.
That would be the “taxpayer-funded doctor” could not be reached, which is not surprising.
This not only implicates all the people in the Probation Department that oversees the LA County Juvenile Hall, and all the bureaucrats who were involved in the decision, it implicates all the people who voted for the politicians who set-up the system.
In a world of real joint-and-several liability, politicians who created these offices could also be cited for the mismanagement of their government system, and the voters who put them into office could be liable as well.
But, for now, there is this action, at least.
The suit — which names as defendants the county, Wang and David Oh, medical director of Juvenile Court Health Services — alleges medical battery and negligence.
All for being defiant. America in the Twenty-First Century. Beware, those who would prefer not to comply with government orders. You, too, could be labeled "oppositional" and "defiant".